Service providers are experiencing ever-growing service usage by subscribers. For example, a service provider providing cellular telephone service can provide the requisite service, in part, by implementing a charging and billing system (or more simply, a charging system), in which subscribers to the cellular telephone service are charged for their service usage. An example charging system may implement a policy and charging control solution, such as that developed under 3GPP™ (3rd Generation Partnership Project) IPMS (Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystems), among other such approaches that support various charging system business models, in the field of cellular telephone service, other communications services (e.g., satellite telephony, messaging, data communications, or the like), or in other fields (e.g., utilities, transportations, and so on).
To attract new users to their services, service providers continue to devise new offers to retain and grow their subscriber base. In the field of communications, one such recent development is concept of a “user group,” the members of which share a common “pool” of one or more balances, which can be used to purchase the desired service(s). The “user group” can represent, for example, members of a family or employees of a corporation. Service providers offer services to groups of one or more subscribers in order to allow such services to be shared between the subscribers of one or more such groups.